Crime Fighting or Corporate Welfare?

I want government to successfully and rationally fight crime and stop terrorism. That’s a perfectly appropriate libertarian sentiment since protecting life, liberty, and property are among the few legitimate roles for government.

But I don’t want to give bureaucrats carte blanche to monitor our lives and I don’t want to waste money in those cases where it is proper for the government to snoop on bad guys.

And those are some of the sentiments I expressed in this panel for Forbes on Fox.

How much are your private conversations worth to the U.S. government? Turns out, it can be a lot, depending on the technology. …AT&T, for example, imposes a $325 “activation fee” for each wiretap and $10 a day to maintain it. Smaller carriers Cricket and U.S. Cellular charge only about $250 per wiretap. But snoop on a Verizon customer? That costs the government $775 for the first month and $500 each month after that… Industry says it doesn’t profit from the hundreds of thousands of government eavesdropping requests it receives each year… “What we don’t want is surveillance to become a profit center,” said Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU’s principal technologist. But “it’s always better to charge $1. It creates friction, and it creates transparency” because it generates a paper trail that can be tracked. …The FBI said it could not say how much it spends on industry reimbursements because payments are made through a variety of programs, field offices and case funds.

I confess that I’m not an expert – or even a novice – on the details of law enforcement, but I’m glad that my speculation on the low cost of setting up a wiretap seems to have been accurate. At least based on this excerpt from the article.

In 2009, then-New York criminal prosecutor John Prather sued several major telecommunications carriers in federal court in Northern California in 2009, including AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, for overcharging federal and state police agencies. In his complaint, Prather said phone companies have the technical ability to turn on a switch, duplicate call information and pass it along to law enforcement with little effort. Instead, Prather says his staff, while he was working as a city prosecutor, would receive convoluted bills with extraneous fees. The case is pending.

This article, as well as the Forbes on Fox debate, deal with general law enforcement, not the controversy about NSA data collection and monitoring.

But I can’t resist sharing this excellent bit of NSA-related humor that arrived in my inbox.

you want a criminal organization “to successfully and rationally fight crime and stop terrorism”?? oh, that’s rich. while you’re on a roll, why not demand also that the government teach children how [ahem] “to successfully” split an infinitive with an adverb? now, I once read that it’s ok to split an infinitive, but it was not made clear if any limitations appy.

speaking of children, here’s a short essay about a few children saluting an important idol of your church. it appears that they are in a classroom, although it’s not at all clear that the classroom is one of the government’s classrooms. it’s entirely possible that they are in, say, a catholic school.

the American global surveillance state has to be costing a fortune… not only in capital… but in international and domestic good will… after the events of 9/11… the bush administration initiated a program of “total informational awareness…” this effort was initially overt… but public and political resistance to the idea quickly turned it covert… snooping on everyone on the planet… what the hell are these people thinking? we are violating laws around the globe… alienating allies… and forcing various countries to build infrastructure that over time will become a viable alternative to our own… and diminish our global influence and prestige… drones overhead… armed drones on our southern border… every police organization in the U.S. recording license plate numbers… time of day and vehicle locations… the post office photographing every piece of mail it handles… phone calls logged and monitored… e-mails read… websites logged… biometric data being collected… and the NSA sorting through all of it… this to keep us safe from a few terrorists.. to keep us free? or to line the pockets of well connected crony capitalists? it’s quite a party…………………………………….. but when you dance… in time… you have to pay the band…